1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a disk drive having housed therein a disk for use as a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, disk drives such as magnetic disk drives, optical disk drives, etc. have been widely used as external recording devices or image recording devices for computers.
A magnetic disk drive, serving as a disk drive, generally has a casing in the shape of a rectangular box. The casing houses a magnetic disk serving as a magnetic recording medium, a spindle motor serving as a drive means for supporting and rotating the magnetic disk, a plurality of magnetic heads for writing information to and reading information from the magnetic disk, a head actuator for movably holding the magnetic heads relative to the magnetic disk, a voice coil motor for pivoting and positioning the head actuator, and a board unit having arranged thereon a head amplifier and the like.
A printed circuit board that controls the operations of the spindle motor, voice coil motor, and magnetic heads is screwed to the outer surface of the casing with the board unit arranged therebetween. An interface (I/F) connector for connecting the magnetic disk drive to an external device is mounted on an end portion of the printed circuit board.
Described in Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2001-210058 discloses a magnetic disk drive in the form of a thin card which can be loaded into a card slot of a personal computer, for example. The card-shaped magnetic disk drive of this type is required to be made thinner and smaller than a conventional one. To meet this requirement, various components are mounted on a plate-shaped base, a support frame is fixed on the peripheral edge of the base, and a plate-shaped top cover is attached to the support frame. Further, a printed circuit board is arranged on the backside of the base, and an I/F connector on the printed circuit board is positioned and held by means of a dedicated fixing member on the support frame.
Furthermore, miniaturization of magnetic disk drives these days is being promoted so that they can be used as recording devices for a wider variety of electronic devices, especially for smaller-sized electronic devices. For example, in a magnetic disk drive having housed therein a disk whose diameter is one inch or more, a printed circuit board, which is so arranged as to overlap the surface of a casing, can be made smaller than the area of the casing surface. However, in a magnetic disk drive having housed therein a disk whose diameter is one inch or less, a printed circuit board is required to be made small due to miniaturization of a casing. Accordingly, the setting space on a printed circuit board is reduced, which makes it difficult to mount a plurality of electronic components thereon. Generally, a magnetic disk drive is provided with a capacitor for a retracting operation which stores electric charge to move the magnetic heads to the retreated position when the power is unexpectedly turned off. Since the capacitor is comparatively large in capacity and dimensions, it becomes difficult to mount the capacitor on a printed circuit board, and the entire magnetic disk drive including the printed circuit board is prevented from being reduced in thickness.